It appeared as if I need the files from the xampp dev tools so I downloaded that and moved the files in INCLUDE and LIB to my xamppfiles directory.

this is what i ran first:
perl Makefile.PL --mysql_config=/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/bin/mysql_config

This was ok, except at the end it said:
Unrecognized argument in LIBS ignored: '-I/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/include'

so i ran make an got this error:
ld: table of contents for archive: /Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.a is out of date; rerun ranlib(1) (can't load from it)
make: *** [blib/arch/auto/DBD/mysql/mysql.bundle] Error 1